It’s somewhat embarrassing that Guess Who sheds no
new insights on race relations, especially in comparison to
its predecessor, the groundbreaking 1967 film Guess Who’s
Coming to Dinner, in which a white daughter raised by
liberal parents surprises them by announcing her engagement
to a black man. That movie made the situation palatable for
viewers by casting Sidney Poitier—the epitome of respectable
black manhood—as the fiancé who happened to be noble, accomplished,
brilliant and, oh yeah, a doctor. I mean, what’s not to like?
The 2005 version, directed by Kevin Rodney Sullivan, stays
this trend even while reversing the situation. This time,
it’s white financial whiz kid Simon (Ashton Kutcher) who is
being sprung on the unsuspecting, affluent family of fiancée
Theresa (Zoë Saldaña). By taking out the potential stings—and
any resulting commentary thus afforded—of class and economics,
the filmmakers have offered a glass that is half empty.

Bernie Mac plays Theresa’s disapproving poppa, Percy Jones,
a loan officer at the local bank. Even before the meeting,
Simon is a wreck. Pictures taken by Theresa of her father
show him looking like he’s about to kill a referee, and this,
we are told, was a happy moment. As the movie moves along,
we realize that Simon was raised by a single parent, a possibly
interesting and decidedly against-type tidbit that could have
been used better to distinguish the personalities of both
him and Percy, but, like so much else in this movie, is wasted.
Screenwriters David Ronn, Jay Scherick and Peter Tolan rely
on the tried and tired in their formulaic writing; arguments
feel made up and underfueled, serving only to provide a setup
for a joke or sight gag. Case in point: Upon arriving home,
Theresa blows a gasket when Percy informs her that Simon cannot
share her bedroom. It’s apparently too much to assume that
Theresa would have known about her father’s rules of the house,
not to mention that neither Percy nor mom Marian (Judith Scott)
had ever heard of or met their future son-in-law at this point.
Clearly, this little flare-up is meant to be the springboard
for a moment when Percy walks in on Simon and Theresa, who
has donned her teddy, gets the “wrong idea,” and banishes
the young man to sleeping in the basement. With him. It’s
all so laborious, no matter how much amusement both Mac and
Kutcher can wring from the thinnest material.

There is one moment when boredom subsides and the audience
sits up and takes notice. At a tense dinner with the extended
Jones clan, Simon informs them how he thinks the best way
to combat prejudice is to tackle it one incident at a time.
For instance, when his uncle told a racist joke at a holiday
gathering, he took him to task for it. The family nods approvingly,
except for Percy, who goads Simon into telling them the joke,
which amuses the family. This leads to an ever more painful
exchange wherein Jones keeps encouraging the reluctant Simon
to tell another one, until the moment when the joke fails
badly, inciting the family’s shock and dismay. Here, Percy,
as victim, lays into Simon, in a decidedly odd turning of
the tables. While I doubt, given the obvious sitcom-like way
the scene concludes, that Sullivan is trying to suggest that
blacks like Percy want to have it both ways, I actually wished
he was trying to say something of that sort, if only to infuse
this tepid story with something provocative. I guess the way
to look at Guess Who is as a buddy film, in which a
tough older codger finally comes to a meeting of the minds
with a young goofball, but even then, it’s a lazy, uninspiring
mess.

She’s
Not All That

Miss
Congeniality 2: Armed and FabulousDirected
by John Pasquin

No one can accuse Sandra Bullock of loving a challenge. Here
she is, playing Miss Congeniality again, and in a sequel that
lacks the original’s one saving grace, its zippy banter. Filled
with a whole lot of cutesy-poo and infrequent sight gags or
one-liners, Miss Congeniality 2:Armed and Fabulous
can better be described as Inane and Innocuous. Bullock, as
cloddish FBI agent Gracie Hart, is quite adept at the kind
of gentle mugging that the vapid script calls for, but she
also gives some hints that she might’ve had to more to offer—such
as when Gracie is dumped, over the phone, by Agent Matthews
(Benjamin Bratt in the original). Bewilderment and disappointment
are telegraphed across her face with a minimum of effort and
not a speck of artifice.

The remainder of the film is a pile of silly contrivances
staged by sitcom director John Pasquin. Because of her appearance
in the beauty pageant of the first Miss, Gracie is
now too famous for fieldwork, and so she accepts an offer
to be the spokesperson for the newly media-savvy FBI. Tempted
by the notion that national exposure might reignite the interest
of Matthews, Gracie revels in her assignment to become “FBI
Barbie.” She requires, of course, another makeover, this time
for her “personal presentation,” and is thus transformed into
a Chanel-wearing mannequin who takes her slick media image
a tad too seriously. The comic conflict, supposedly, comes
from Gracie’s interactions with her mannish bodyguard, Sam
Fuller (Regina King), an agent who is on probation for her
violent temper. The versatile King (Jerry Maguire,
Ray) can’t bring anything to this cardboard role other
than her whipcrack articulation. After some especially unfunny
tussles, Sam somehow inspires Gracie to rediscover the tomboy
side that made her such an effective agent. Actually, Gracie
is more amusing as a stuck-up mannequin.

Meanwhile, Miss United States (Heather Burns) and her manager
(William Shatner) are kidnapped and held for ransom somewhere
in Las Vegas. Shatner steals his crumbs of screen time, but
as in the first Miss, the funniest character is a gay
stylist. Michael Caine’s old-school beauty consultant is replaced
by Joel (Diedrich Bader), a chi-chi personal stylist who follows
Gracie everywhere, acting as her de facto partner. (After
barging into a debriefing, he admits that he prefers boxers.)
Miss 2 undoubtedly would have have been funnier if
it had dispensed with King’s bodyguard and the predictable
female bonding and just let Gracie hang with Joel (and his
two assistants, whose indie-rocker affectations could have
been mined for more than just walk-ons). Treat Williams deserves
better than to be used as filler as the hardass Vegas chief,
while Elisabeth Röhm reprises her Law & Order role
to no effect whatsoever. Miss Congeniality 2 takes
the easy way out, going for cute and fuzzy over sharp and
funny at every turn. Except for the tacked-on ending, which
is pure schmaltz.

—Ann
Morrow

Watch
and Be Cursed With Boredom

The
Ring TwoDirected
by Hideo Nakata

At the beginning of this sequel to the Gore Verbinski-directed
American version of Nakata’s Japanese thriller, Rachel Keller
(Naomi Watts) asks her young boy, Aidan (David Dorfman), if
he can’t refer to her as his mother as opposed to “Rachel.”
At the end of the film, Rachel tells him to call her Rachel.
Presumably, her attempts to be a good mother throughout The
Ring Two’s disjointed onslaught of shocks and ghostly
attacks have put as much strain on her maternal feelings as
they have on our forbearance of foolishness.

As did the original, this ringlet concerns the evil child
Samara (Daveigh Chase), who is featured in the cursed videotape
that dooms anyone who watches it unless he or she can dupe
some poor innocent into watching a duplicate of it within
one week. This time the video gets little play, and Samara
is intent on exercising her will over Rachel and Aidan. It
seems she wants Rachel as a surrogate mother to replace the
one who disposed of Samara down a well. Worsening matters,
Samara wants to be an only child. Various people who see or
don’t see the video get killed or subjected to a novel form
of Japanese water torture as Rachel tries to keep Aidan out
of Samara’s clammy grasp.

While plot may not have been the most important ingredient
of Nakata’s past works, the original Ringu and its
American adaptation and Nakata’s own Japanese sequel, Ringu
2, all held together and built a sense of slowly mounting
dread. Much of that suspense, however, came from atmosphere
and Nakata’s occasionally offhanded inclusion of details that
might or might not be considered threats.

This time we merely get a case of ring goo as The Ring
Two leaps from shock to shock with nary a connecting thread.
And surprise is no substitute for the suspense and mood found
in this film’s muted, and sometimes monochromatic, precursors,
which slowly counted down the days one had left to live. It’s
as if Nakata’s style has been drained from him and replaced
by the less exacting trappings of contemporary Western approaches
to horror.

A couple of his touches remain. Early in the film there is
a throwaway shot of a man’s side that introduces a fleeting
sense of menace—even if the partial torso and arm ultimately
represents no real danger. The film’s one effective showpiece
makes scary, if random, use of one of nature’s most beautiful
and harmless creatures, a deer. It appears incongruously next
to an amusement park ride which one assumes would scare it
away. Later a herd of deer are used to particularly upsetting
effect certain to play into every motorist’s fear of hitting
one.

Watts is again quite good as Rachel, and were it not for her,
there would be little to compel one’s intermittent interest
in the film. Credit her with pretending to know what’s happening
even when the sodden script scuttles sense, coherence and
transitions.